I use Explorer to do quite a lot of one-off file ops. The equivalent on the Mac is utterly despicable. Shell's not so bad but it's hardly "easy" or "intuitive" compared to drag and drop and my tiny brain is often busy trying to remember something else at the time.

I have to say, Windows Explorer on Windows 7 is not that bad, and in Windows 8 it's even better (and yes, I will succumb to this, "shiny" and "pretty" ). Total Commander is awesome too but it's so ugly

My first Windows was XP. Doesn't look the greatest, but works really well on weaker machines.Then I used Vista and hated it. UI is important, but not in the way Vista accomplished it.Windows 7 is awesome. Even better than Vista's UI, but also efficient.Disliked Metro (give me my start menu back!!! )

I use Explorer to do quite a lot of one-off file ops. The equivalent on the Mac is utterly despicable. Shell's not so bad but it's hardly "easy" or "intuitive" compared to drag and drop and my tiny brain is often busy trying to remember something else at the time.

Cas

Admittedly Finder lacks a few features: jumping to the correct file on multiple keystrokes, listing full file path, etc. Though it also has some very handy features that I use frequently -- column view, spring loaded drag & drop (and smoother drag & drop in general, if you ask me), QuickLook (IMO superior, smoother and more reliable than Explorer Preview), color labels, Spotlight, etc. What makes Finder so utterly despicable?

Of course, the awesome new Explorer features in Windows 8 make the discussion moot.

Yeah my uncle used this when I was really young, and I watched.Everything was giant, even the cursor; you put in a floppy disk, and it takes like 5 minutes until you can even start it / look at the contentsand I remember a lot of flickering on the screen while it loads stuffGuess it wasn't 1.2 though, because I remember playing games like Shufflepuck Cafe later on.

Yeah my uncle used this when I was really young, and I watched.Everything was giant, even the cursor; you put in a floppy disk, and it takes like 5 minutes until you can even start it / look at the contents

Yep, patience was a virtue, something that severely lacks nowadays. I remember waiting a whopping 8-9 minutes for the crappy Castlevania port to actually boot.

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and I remember a lot of flickering on the screen while it loads stuff

Busted! You were running cracked stuff. Those flashing screens were used to basically indicate to crackers that their unpackers were doing something.

NOTE: accuracy of that statement not guaranteed, it was a year or two ago that an actual cracker from the good old days (Fairlight) explained it.

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Guess it wasn't 1.2 though, because I remember playing games like Shufflepuck Cafe later on.

You're talking about basic Amiga usage which did not require the workbench for everything. The workbench was just a graphical shell to the OS which could be leveraged to have (multitasking, multiuser) applications with a windowing system. Most applications just had their own bootloaders on the disc to be able to run without any extra help.

To know if it was workbench 1.2: was the background a horrible green? If so: we're talking about the same thing

To know if it was workbench 1.2: was the background a horrible green? If so: we're talking about the same thing

Nah it was white or blue.I remember a floppy disk symbol with the word amiga on it and a hand grabbing it. but maybe a lot versions had that

Blue was workbench 1.3, which was more of the same really but built for the kickstart 1.3 revision (basically the OS of the machine that was stored in a ROM) which was present in later releases of the computer That hand was what the Amiga would show if the computer could get through its initialization steps successfully and if you booted it without any disc in the drive, inviting you to do just that Aaaaaah memories.

A Linux where the GUI was thoroughly integrated into the OS and designed by that rare beast - a real UI designer - is what I want, rather than the bastard-son-of-X and all that terrifyingly shit Unity/GNOME/KDE/etc. monstrosities.

Unity/Gnome/KDE/etc are mediocre, but they are adequate. I am typically using a shell window, a web browser, email client, TeXmaker, a few Swing apps (IntelliJ), IM client (Pidgin), maybe Skype, and a text editor (geany, gedit, or vim). The GUI isn't a work of art or anything, but it is completely functional and adequate. What do you want from the GUI that is broken or missing?

As a *long* time Windows user, I recently switched to Linux (Ubuntu). *Huge* upgrade, for programming and math/science work:

The advantages of Linux over Windows:

- Command line. Linux shell is far nicer than Windows cmd.exe. Piping works better. All the command line tools work better and are fully designed to work with piping/chaining/scripting. Linux also has fancier shells like zsh, which I'm just now starting to learn and see benefits to (for example, the Git shell integration is awesome).- Command line is often so much simpler than using GUI apps. For example, when I need to convert an image from one format to another (like PNG -> JPG), on Windows I used to use Paint.NET, on Linux it's just a simpler command line. Way faster, way simpler, and easily batchable.- Proper aliases. windows has shortcuts that don't really work in the command line sense.- Free software repo. Often rather than scouring the web for the right shareware, I can just use the Linux repo, which is basically guaranteed to be malware free and nagware free and uninstallable.- Faster. Seriously, web browsing is faster, booting is faster, no virus checking which was necessary on Windows. Even though I scheduled it to run at 4AM, it would run at completely different times anyway, and stop me from cancelling it or using my computer when I needed to.- Less crap ware. For example, on Windows when I installed a printer driver or scanner driver, I'd see HP/Canon junk in my Windows tray and every time I had to reboot. On Linux, using printer/scanners is fully plug/play and completely crap ware free.- Works better with Python and Hadoop. These things can work on Windows, but they really work better with a *NIX system. Hadoop requires *NIX tools on Windows. Installing python and ipython and scipy on Linux is a breeze, where it's a headache on Windows.- I plan to upgrade from the Unity window manager to xmonad when I am ready. This looks like a major usability upgrade over the overlapping resizeable window paradigm on Win/Mac.

Downsides:

- Games. ~90% of PC games are Windows-only, and maybe ~9% are Windows/Mac. It is *rare* to have native Linux support.- On drivers: overall, Linux is great and ompletely plug-and-play. I've hit one significant exception. When I dock/undock my laptop, I have to manually switch between my desktop monitor and laptop screen where Windows would do this automatically.

A Linux where the GUI was thoroughly integrated into the OS and designed by that rare beast - a real UI designer - is what I want

Erm... did you ever try out KDE? There are people out there, having made everything in KDE look like gnome, people who made kde look like osx. With compiz you can even design your own window borders, you just draw them. Also, I'm sure KDE has the most design-options from all OS's and all other window managers.

One thing I detest is UI customisation I want everything to always work the same way and behave the same way.

One of Linux-on-the-desktop's biggest problems is the existence of X, followed by the existence of multiple GUI shells. X must die, and all the shells must be replaced by One Shell To Rule Them All, that is made by someone who understands the importance of spacing, colour, and so on. The Ubuntu people were getting quite close with the style on Gnome until they had some sort of brain spasm and released Unity, presumably as some sort of sick joke. Close-ish, anyway. File manager still abhorrent; task bar thing was still a joke; basic window management still felt clunky and difficult. I did really like their new font though.

The Ubuntu people were getting quite close with the style on Gnome until they had some sort of brain spasm and released Unity, presumably as some sort of sick joke.

I agree completely. Haven't used Ubuntu since Unity, only Linux Mint... Still like gnome better.

I also agree with most gene9 points out as good for linux. That being said, these point are peanuts in comparison with software you need to work that doesn't. In short, and not to repeat myself needlessly, things like the whole Adobe Suite just have to work, natively or with wine...

One of Linux-on-the-desktop's biggest problems is the existence of X, followed by the existence of multiple GUI shells. X must die

Efforts to kill X are underway with the Wayland project, several large projects (Android, Ubuntu, Fedora, KDE, Compiz, etc) have already expressed their intentions to eventually switch to it. Its much lighter weight than X (as it doesn't have all the legacy API's and design dating back to the 80's) and since they are building it from the ground up for modern hardware hopefully they'll get just the right and minimal API. Its also directly uses cool stuff like OpenGL ES and has other nice features like every frame being perfect (i.e. never any flicker). Sadly X is pretty entrenched and the logistics behind replacing are pretty huge, so it'll take a few years before we start seeing Wayland in mainstream distro's.

I'm impressed this hasn't turned into a flamewar. As someone who knows how to use all 3 dominant OS's at least to some degree (Windows, Mac, Linux), I like Mac OS the best. Then I have it set to dual-boot into Windows for the off chance I need it, and I have a VPS running Fedora for when I need that.

I'm surprised so many people complain about "lickable" interfaces. The thing is, Apple especially is attempting to mimic how we interact with things outside of computers. Nothing instantaneously appears anywhere, instead it moves. Similarly, all their pushing of different gesture systems and incredibly annoyingly swapping scroll direction in Lion (so you're directing the content rather than the window around it, which intuitively makes sense but is the opposite of the common paradigm) is all about getting it closer to a "physical" interface. Like in Minority Report.

That being said, a lot of this behavior wastes milliseconds and is certainly slower than having hundreds of custom keyboard shortcuts. I once knew an engineer who was an absolute expert with emacs, and when trying to do something on my machine had to install it because otherwise he was completely stunted. Using it, however, he flew through and was astoundingly fast. And that's really the thing. Super users who can memorize a few hundred hotkeys, set up thousands of unix aliases, and the like will always be more efficient than somebody using a "lickable" GUI. But my grandfather can jump in and use this GUI and understand what's going on. That's pretty incredible.

I'm a person, as some of you may know, who hates wasting time learning what's going on under the hood. If it works and it's fast enough, I never bother. I like to be pretty much as top level as possible, because I want my vision to come to fruition. I don't want to spend time memorizing hotkeys and details. And I feel like the more the world moves out of the need for people to memorize esoteric nonsense, the better. Even if we're all a little slower.

I also agree with most gene9 points out as good for linux. That being said, these point are peanuts in comparison with software you need to work that doesn't. In short, and not to repeat myself needlessly, things like the whole Adobe Suite just have to work, natively or with wine...

I think you are right. Many popular graphics/art/video/music tools are not Linux native and if those are important for what you are doing, Linux is a poor choice.

For programmers and math/science types, all the best tools are on Linux, and many of the best tools work best on Linux.

One thing I detest is UI customisation I want everything to always work the same way and behave the same way.

One of Linux-on-the-desktop's biggest problems is the existence of X, followed by the existence of multiple GUI shells. X must die, and all the shells must be replaced by One Shell To Rule Them All, that is made by someone who understands the importance of spacing, colour, and so on. The Ubuntu people were getting quite close with the style on Gnome until they had some sort of brain spasm and released Unity, presumably as some sort of sick joke. Close-ish, anyway. File manager still abhorrent; task bar thing was still a joke; basic window management still felt clunky and difficult. I did really like their new font though.

Are you talking about cross-application UI consistency? Who cares if my web browser, IM client, and text editor have different widget sets or UI flourishes? So what?!?

I know programmers who hate the premise of manual window management, so they just replace Unity with xmonad. Linux makes it easy to drop in the window manager of your choice, so I don't see why people complain so much.

X may be replaced by Wayland, which sounds great, but in the meantime, I don't see any major problems with Linux GUI. All the apps I use look nice, even if they are inconsistent. IntelliJ looks foreign since it's Swing, but so what, the functionality is amazing.

I may be in a majority of one here, but I feel I must come out of the closet and admit that I love Ubuntu 12.04 and Unity!

I think it's a great interface, lots of useful keyboard / text driven features, and the whole interface just stays out of the way unless you need it. Still, it's actually not that far away from how I used to have Mint set up. Maybe it stems from the fact that I still think the best OS ever was RiscOS (showing my age a little there!)

I don't see why windows and linux users bash each other. they should both bash Mac OS. when i used it it slowed down at a greater rate than windows does, and i couldn't find ANYTHING. It's like they took the best parts of windows and the best parts of linux... and shoved them.

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